- Four Reporters Subpoenaed After Asking About Trump’s Qatari Air Force One’s Defenses
Source: Military.com
“On Friday, federal agents delivered grand jury subpoenas to four New York Times journalists, arriving in some cases at their homes, days after the paper reported the Secret Service had urged President Donald Trump to leave Turkey aboard an older jet rather than his new Qatari-gifted Air Force One. The subpoenas order Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, and Eric Schmitt to testify Wednesday before a federal grand jury in Manhattan ‘in regard to an alleged violation of criminal law,’ according to the Times, which says it will fight the order. David McCraw, the paper’s newsroom lawyer, said the sight of federal agents on reporters’ doorsteps ‘should shock the conscience of any American.’ Issuing them was Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, whom Trump nominated last month to serve as director of national intelligence, the Times reported.” (07/11/26)
https://www.military.com/justice-department-subpoenas-reporters-air-force-one-security
- Beshear: “Tell us what’s going on” with McConnell
Source: The Tennessean
“Mitch McConnell ‘continues his recovery in the hospital,’ his office said Saturday, July 11, offering the same update similar to what it has given for weeks even as new details emerge about the morning the U.S. senator was rushed to the hospital. … Saturday’s statement came as Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear continued to press for information about the health of the U.S. senator who represents his state. ‘Let’s end the crazy speculation. Just tell us what’s going on,’ Beshear wrote in a social media post July 11. The 84-year-old Republican senator was hospitalized on June 14, and his office has offered little beyond confirming that he remains under care.” (07/11/26)
- Malaysia: PM’s Coalition Routed by Key Partner in Johor State Poll
Source: US News & World Report
“Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s coalition suffered a crushing defeat to a key partner in a regional poll on Saturday, raising questions over the strength of the blocs’ alliance at the federal level amid talk of an early general election. While the result in Malaysia’s southern Johor state will not directly impact Anwar’s majority in parliament, it could deepen strains between Anwar’s Pakatan Harapan grouping and the Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition – rivals that joined forces to form a government after a hung general election in 2022. While Pakatan and BN insist their federal partnership can withstand differences at the state level, Anwar said in May he would consider calling a snap poll if internal divisions continued to widen.” (07/11/26)
- The Dishonesty of Political Buyer’s Remorse
Source: Garrison Center
by Thomas L Knapp“On June 9, Graham Platner won the Democratic Party’s nomination for US Senate from Maine with 72.1% of the primary vote. On July 10, Platner withdrew from the race, presumably due to popular demand by the same voters who nominated him. I’m tempted to a bit of schadenfreude toward those voters. This was not a case of ‘seems like a really good guy, very consistent, upright citizen … oh my God, I had no idea!’ Platner’s entire short political career — his whole adult life, in fact — resembles a locomotive, on fire, pulling boxcars stuffed full of dynamite, accelerating down tracks that terminate at a children’s playground.” (07/12/26)
- Are Economic Systems Amoral?
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Ella Dawson“Can economic systems really be moral or immoral? The end of all economic systems, according to one interpretation of Plato’s Republic, is justice. ‘Plato’s starting point is that the organization of society depends ultimately upon knowledge of the end of existence,’ John Dewey, the father of modern education, writes: ‘If we do not know its end we shall be at the mercy of accident and caprice. Unless we know the end, the good, we shall have no criterion for rationally deciding what the possibilities are which should be promoted, nor how social arrangements are to be ordered’ Dewey is correct, that without a certain end, we shall be at the mercy of accident and ‘caprice’—meaning unpredictable and sudden changes. But Dewey is wrong (and potentially Plato as well) both about approaching economics from a collective angle, and implying that social arrangements even need to be artificially ordered.” (07/10/26)
- Why Local Governments Must Ban Flock Safety Surveillance Cameras
Source: Karl Dickey’s Freedom Vanguard
by Karl Dickey“Municipalities allow a private corporation to track free citizens while corrupt officers use the data for personal stalking.” (07/11/26)
https://palmbeachexaminer.substack.com/p/why-local-governments-must-ban-flock
- The vibe shift in American socialism
Source: Washington Post
by Megan McArdle“I stand by my assertion that the Soviet Union’s demise cast a long pall over the word ‘socialism’” — at least for those who had not already recoiled from the purges, famines and censorship. I grew up on the Upper West Side, one of the remaining redoubts of socialism in the Reagan era, and watched as the toppling of the Berlin Wall crushed the last hopes that central planning could work. Encountering a socialist holdout in the 1990s was as quaint as finding someone who still believed in alchemy. This makes the current renaissance all the more remarkable. Yet what’s also striking is how little the movement resembles the socialists I remember from my youth.” (07/12/26)
- How Israel and American Zionists Are Canceling First Amendment
Source: CounterPunch
by Jamal Kanj“Pro-Israel foundations fund Think Tanks and media organizations that set the parameters of acceptable debate before a single word is written. Social media algorithms suppress Palestinian postings while amplifying Israeli military statements as authoritative fact. TikTok became a ‘Chinese security risk’ the moment it fell outside their algorithmic control. American Zionists pressured Congress to force its sale, ensuring the last major social media platform joined every other American social media outlet under the thumb of Israel-first ownership. Zionist influence over social media is not a conspiracy theory; it is an openly declared strategy. … Israel’s bullying of American activists critical of Israel and media outlets is not about defamation or even prevailing in court. It is a deterrence strategy by making the financial cost of covering Israeli war crimes high enough that editors think twice before approving the next investigation.” (07/10/26)
- The First Amendment’s “trust” in young adults
Source: Christian Science Monitor
by staff“An appeals court ruled this week that the First Amendment’s freedom of speech principle protects the right of academics in Florida to discuss topics in class that some might view as discriminatory or even offensive. The 2-1 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit struck down Florida’s 2022 W.O.K.E. Act, which sought to define how professors at higher education institutions could teach or present what it called ‘divisive concepts’ of race and gender. Supporters of the law said it helped prevent teaching theories that could promote discrimination against students for actions ‘committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin or sex’. Critics viewed it as an attempt to quash candid inquiry into historical and current debates around race and rights.” (07/10/26)
- War Watch: The Masque of the Red Death
Source: The Realist Review
by Martin Sieff“They were lucky in 1914: They only had the Guns of August to worry about. Here in 2026, we are facing thermonuclear weapons. However, now Prince Prospero himself – in the guise of US President Donald Trump – has just presided over the latest NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. Far more than the ghastly, doomed revelry in Roger Corman’s classic 1964 schlock horror movie starring Vincent Price and Hazel Court, it has been the last and greatest ‘Masque of the Red Death.'” (07/11/26)
https://therealistreview.substack.com/p/war-watch-the-masque-of-the-red-death
- The Supreme Court has ruled: One jury shouldn’t write the nation’s warning labels
Source: The Hill
by Cory L Andrews“Last month, the Supreme Court held in Monsanto v. Durnell that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act, in tandem with the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, bars a state jury from punishing the maker of Roundup for omitting a cancer warning the EPA has repeatedly refused to require. The decision was right on the law. The reason has less to do with weedkiller than with who, in a country of 50 states and one federal regulator, gets to write the label.” (07/10/26)
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/5959470-supreme-court-monsanto-glyphosate-ruling/
- It’s A Race Between Revolutionary Consciousness And The Implementation Of Police Robots
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone“John F Kennedy was correct when he said ‘Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable’. That’s why police robots are being aggressively normalized today. The empire managers want to make sure violent revolution is impossible, too. The New York Times’[s] sports department The Athletic has a creepy new article out titled ‘The ‘Robodogs’ on World Cup patrol in Mexico’ about how wonderful and awesome it is that the international soccer tournament is being patrolled by surveillance robots. The article is functionally a PR piece for police robots, gushing about how ‘cute’ and ‘cool’ onlookers find the dystopian technology.” (07/11/26)
- A Guide to a Muscular Liberalism
Source: Persuasion
by Roger Partridge“Every political tradition faces the question of what constitutes a good life. But only liberalism struggles so visibly to offer a straightforward answer. Authoritarians promise order and national greatness. Socialists promise equality. Post-liberal writers promise meaning and belonging through restored religious and civilizational authority—a life ordered to faith, family, and place. Liberalism alone points nowhere in particular. Its answer—freedom—tells you what to protect, not what to do with it. Yet that silence is not emptiness. It reflects a wise limit: no one can know in advance the forms a flourishing life will take.” (07/10/26)
https://www.persuasion.community/p/a-guide-to-a-muscular-liberalism
- The 2026 Midterm Vigil (No. 2): The Democrats’ “Failure to Miscommunicate”
Source: American Greatness
by Thaddeus G McCotter“Many moons ago, while serving in Congress, I heard a senior member of the GOP House leadership offer this assessment of the Democrats’ strategy on a particular issue: ‘The Democrats always overplay their hand’. Heading into the 2026 midterm elections, however, it seems less a case of the Democrat minority overplaying its hand than of revealing it. Everyone is well-versed in the historical fact that a president’s party usually loses seats in a midterm election. As this is President Trump’s second midterm election, early projections suggest it will prove as disastrous for the GOP as the first one was in 2018.” (07/11/26)
- Unattended Baggage, episode 348
Source: Unattended Baggage
“Weekend at Mitch’s.” (07/11/26)
https://unattendedbaggage.substack.com/p/episode-348-weekend-at-mitchs
- Pink Flame of Liberty, 07/11/26
Source: Pink Flame of Liberty
“NRSC v. FEC – Discussion and Relation to the RFK, Jr. JFC.” (07/11/26)
- The Good Fight, 07/11/26
Source: Yascha Mounk
“Deirdre McCloskey on What Really Caused the Industrial Revolution.” (07/11/26)